


good lamb black sheep

by lizzieraindrops



Series: A midnight study in purple [6]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 01:57:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6265150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzieraindrops/pseuds/lizzieraindrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Veera infiltrates DYAD, she and Rachel steal a car together, and Rachel most definitely does not throw up in that car. An AU branching off of canon sometime not long after Helsinki.</p><p>Originally posted for a prompt <a href="http://lizzieraindrops.tumblr.com/post/141137162019/veera-and-rachel-21">on tumblr</a>.</p><p> </p><p> <i>21. Things you said when we were on top of the world</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	good lamb black sheep

“We have to leave. _Now_.” Seven minutes left.

“I’m not going anywhere with _you_ ,” Rachel hisses.

Veera closes her eyes for a moment, seeking refuge in the darkness behind her lids. The fluorescent lights that wash out the hallway have always made it too bright to think. But these days, that hospital-glare features ever more brightly in nightmares entangled with memories, and the vibrating light makes the skin on her shoulders prickle like they remember what hackles are.

 _Rachel’s_ not making this any easier, either.

“Look,” Veera says, checking her watch. Six minutes forty-five seconds. “At least part of this place is about to go up in flames. Come with me.”

“I don’t need your pity,” Rachel spits. Her entire body seems to arch into the tight curl of her fists. Veera’s almost surprised to not see blood dripping from her palms.

Veera shakes her head in frustration. She turns toward the end of the hall, her escape route. But she doesn't leave yet. “This isn’t _about_ pity.”

She has the information she came for... but Rachel has so much more. Stealing this key research from right under DYAD’s nose is worth the risk she’s currently incurring, but Rachel... Rachel has lived her entire life here. She’s a treasure trove of intelligence Veera never even dreamed of accessing. Not only that, but Veera _remembers_ her. Her name is a spark leaping from the memory of that first fire. With time, they can uncover the forgotten embers underneath.

She rounds on Rachel again, staring down at the diamond-tiled floor so she can focus on the words she needs to get out. Words that will sway that palpable stiff anger.

“ _You_ have information I want. _I_ can get you out of here. Far away.” She hears Rachel trying to interrupt, but Veera just tugs the drawstring of her hood so that the fabric is flush against her ears, as if to shut her out. “They keep you here, don’t they. Like they kept Jade, and Effie.”

There's the click of a slender wooden stiletto on white tile. One threatening step toward her.

“I have more power in this situation than _any_ of you. _I_ made Helsinki burn.”

Veera feels her teeth lock into something that wants to become a snarl. Her eyes finally flick upward to lock solidly with Rachel’s. She remembers how Matti always told her not to stare at people like that, because it makes them uncomfortable.

_Dead. The others are dead. And she wants me to believe she lit the fire that killed them._

Veera takes a few steady breaths. Rachel’s smoldering gaze doesn’t falter. Neither does Veera. The buzz of the fluorescent lighting is the only sound, but not for long. Six minutes.

It would be so nice to have someone to blame. But nothing Veera does will bring them(her) back now. Rachel's knowledge is too valuable to waste, if she can get it. And on some level, they both know that Rachel's deluding herself about the real scope of her influence.

“You couldn't burn _me_ ," Veera says in a quiet voice held as low as a threat. "Will you have _any_ power left, once you do something they don’t like? You’re just another one of us to them.”

Something flickers behind Rachel’s eyes. It might be fear. From the contortion of her face, it’s more likely fury.

“I am nothing like _you,_ ” Rachel whispers. The curl of her lip turns Veera’s very existence into an insult.

Veera breaks their eye contact to close her eyes, shaking her head in disgust with a hopeless sigh. This isn’t getting her anywhere. She hefts her checkered backpack by its straps and thinks of the stolen compact discs she’s stashed inside it. This is enough.

She makes ready to leave, but pauses once more.

“You could do more damage than I ever could,” she says almost wistfully. In a last effort, she makes herself meet Rachel’s eyes once again; more softly this time. Those familiar dark hazel irises are always the same color, but they never look the same.

“You could make this castle crumble into pieces from the inside out. But fine.” Veera abruptly turns away and starts walking down the hall. Five minutes. “ _You_ can stay here and burn this time if you want.”

For a moment, Veera’s quick, quiet steps are the only sound. Then, she hears Rachel’s spiked heels making the ground scream as she comes after her. Veera speeds up. She’s already leaving. Rachel can follow if she wants.

Suddenly, a hand the same size as her own wraps around her upper arm and _holds_. Veera twists away violently, nearly crashing into the wall. She rips those fingers off of her in a shimmer of silver nailpolish. Somehow, her muscles are even more tightly strung with tension than they were just moments before, and she's been anxious about this operation all day long.

“ _Don’t_ touch me,” she snaps, pouring all her angry energy into glaring straight at Rachel once again.

“I can get us a vehicle.” Rachel’s voice and face have gone flat and dead. Her eyes are seething and sparking with inner turmoil, but they’re not looking at Veera, not really. So she’s not the thing Rachel’s thinking of betraying.

A car will be conspicuous, but faster than the bus.

Veera hesitates for an instant longer. This is the only chance she will ever get.

She nods.

“This way.”

Rachel turns and leads them back down the hall in the opposite direction. Into an elevator and down, down, down. A code punched into a keypad. A keyring with a silver key. A parking garage. Four minutes.

Rachel clicks the key fob and the sleek black sedan in front of them chirrups in response. Then she holds the key out toward Veera. Her bent wrist dangles it carelessly at the end of her extended arm.

Veera just looks at it. “I’m not a great driver. You drive, I’ll navigate.”

“No.”

“Rachel, we need to leave _now_. Just drive.”

“No. I - no.”

Veera looks at her face again. Something’s going on with her, but she still looks the same: flat expression, frantic eyes.

“... Do you _know_ how to drive?”

“I -” Rachel swallows. The suppressed emotion in her eyes leaks into the tension at the corners of her mouth.

Veera sighs and snatches the keyring from her. Her conjectures were correct: Rachel is(was) a pet kept in a glass box. She deftly twists the key off the ring and throws the fat, gleaming DYAD logo away, ringing and skittering across the concrete floor. A likely tracking device if she ever saw one. There's probably one in the car itself, too, she realizes. But it's too late to worry about that now.

Even the luxurious purr of the silver-lined sedan puts Veera on edge, too loud in the silence of the garage. She does a double take over her shoulder as Rachel lets herself into the backseat behind her instead of the passenger side. 

Veera shakes her head, putting her confusion and curiosity aside for now. Myriad new doubts are crowding the edges of her mind, but it's too late. She really hopes this impulsive risk doesn’t blow up in her face.

Two minutes.

Veera steers them toward the mouth of the garage, mentally bracing herself for the overwhelming sensory nightmare of a main road in rush hour. “What’s the best route to the highway?” she asks as she noses the car into the sunlight.

“I don’t know.” The curt response might have been a recording. Veera sighs. Apparently Rachel’s helpfulness ended at acquiring a vehicle.

Three almost-missed turns, two pounding stress headaches, a impressive number of Finnish and British curses, and one flagrantly disregarded stoplight later, they’re merging onto the highway and headed north. The late afternoon light glances orange off the road like a mirror.

Somewhere behind them, yet another laboratory is catching fire.

Veera glances in the rear-view. Rachel has moved to the passenger side of the backseat. They're in the corners of the car farthest from each other. Rachel's alternating between staring into her lap and out the tinted window. Her bare arms keep twitching, like she wants to wrap them around herself, but won't tolerate such a gesture.

Veera turns her eyes back to the road.

 

***

 

After a wordless half-hour, filled with only the incessant roar of earth and air pounding at speeding metal, Rachel speaks.

"Where are we stopping." It's not a question. Her voice is still clipped and dead.

Veera steals another glance at her in the mirror. She looks tense, and faintly green.

Veera has already developed fifty new reservations about bringing Rachel over the course of this peculiar commute. But if Rachel gets sick in the car, Veera is _really_ going to start regretting this.

"... Are you going to throw up? I'm pulling over."

"I will _not_." Rachel voice squeezes through her perfectly aligned teeth. Her eyes in the mirror look like they're bulging slightly with compressed fury, or just with compression. It's as if the very idea of physiological weakness is a personal insult, and Rachel is refusing to acknowledge it by cramping herself into static immobility. Well, if it keeps her from vomiting, Veera's not going to complain.

"How much further." Her British accent sounds like it's been stepped on.

"Maybe twenty minutes until we reach the outskirts. Then we hide the car and take the bus that leaves at eight-thirty. This car is a lot faster than the first bus I was going to take; we'll have some extra time. We'll use it to find you some different clothes."

"What for." The flatness of her voice crushes any question marks out of the statement.

Veera eyes the reflection of her silken white blouse and fitted silvery skirt in the mirror. "We're taking a Greyhound bus to the next province. You will not blend in like that." Veera has made a lifelong study of what kinds of presentation draw unwanted attention. The flattering cut of Rachel's pricey business casual attire is very high on the list.

"And _you_ will?"

Veera finds herself clenching her teeth again. She realizes with dismay that this is going to be a recurring theme with Rachel.

"More than you will if you don't change."

Rachel lets a short breath of air through her nose, as if she's amused. Veera doesn't know whether or not to respond.

"I might have enough extra cash for something simple..." Veera continues, realizing that Rachel had walked out of DYAD with nothing but the clothes on her body and the polish on her nails. She runs over the numbers in her head, grimacing as she realizes that she now has to double the allotment for bus fare and food. The extra room she'd calculated into her budget for emergencies will barely cover _that_ as it is.

Veera takes one hand off the wheel to rub at her arm where Rachel grabbed her earlier. She's not bruised, but she can still feel the ghostly impression of those painted fingers, and it makes her skin crawl. Theoretically, they're made of the same flesh, but a human touch has rarely felt more alien to her.

Oh.

"Nevermind. I brought a spare set of clothes. They should fit you."

"Brilliant." Rachel sounds utterly unimpressed.

Veera reminds herself that grinding her teeth is not good for her.

Rachel starts making a repetitive sound that might be a chuckle.

" _What?_ " That almost inaudible lurch of vocalization is really creeping Veera out.

"This entire situation is -" Rachel pauses briefly to squeeze her eyes shut and press her lips together, evidently fighting off a wave of motion sickness. "- is absolutely _incredible_."

"Do you want to go back?" Veera snaps, glaring at Rachel's reflection in the mirror.

For the first time since they left DYAD, Rachel meets her eyes again, narrowing hers slightly. Veera looks quickly back to the lane. She doesn't have enough attention to spare for both high-speed driving _and_ another exhausting visual altercation with this dubious doppelganger.

"No." Rachel says quietly. Veera hardly hears it over the rumble of the car, but it's there. She imagines the vibration of the tiny word bouncing off of her skin, and shrugs in discomfort. They fall back into uneasy silence until they reach the exit.

True to her word, Rachel manages to not throw up. When they park the car in the corner of a dusty abandoned lot, she steps out of the car with considerable poise. However, her face is sickly pale except for her red lipstick.

Veera makes a mental note to make her eat something with ginger in it before letting her board the bus.

 

***

 

An hour later, dusk is falling as they wait at the bus stop. Veera is perching on the end of the hard bench. Rachel is standing a short distance away in Veera's spare jeans, with the sleeves of her oversized black _Opeth_ t-shirt hanging down nearly to her elbows. Her infrequent movements are still elegant yet somewhat stilted, as if her body is entirely unused to the resistance of denim. It's a haughty kind of painstakingly cultivated grace that makes Veera fidget just _looking_ at her.

The rising evening breeze is making the edges of her short blonde bob flutter. Her old clothes and heels have been shoved into a cheap canvas tote bag they found at the convenience store a block away, along with a pair of summer's-end clearance faux-leather sandals. The shoes and the sunflower-patterned bag slung over her shoulder make her look like a tourist, except for her seething stare and icy demeanor. Whenever Rachel shifts her weight on her flat feet, the blinking silver of her nails against dark indigo catch Veera's eyes like little stars.

She still looks almost as out of place as before.

Finally, the bus trundles up to their stop, braking with a screech that makes Veera wince.

The bus is fairly empty, so they spread out on a stretch of several seats. They ignore the luggage rack and drop their bags in the three seats between them like a barrier. Veera's not letting her backpack out of arm's reach, not with her computer and her precious stolen research inside of it. She unzips the main pocket and digs around inside it for a minute, until she comes up with a half-finished bag of hard ginger candies. She holds them out to Rachel without looking at her.

"For when you get sick. Buses are worse than my driving."

" _That_ is an impressive feat," Rachel says in a tone of bitter resignation. But she takes the bag, carefully avoiding touching Veera's hand.

Veera shrugs it off. She _did_ warn Rachel before she got into the DYAD car.

She digs around in her bag a little more and pulls out her portable Walkman player and headphones. She briefly lowers her hood to snap the bulky headphones over her ears. Then she smooths her short hair down, pulls her hood back up, and settles in for the six-hour ride. The Walkman whirs to life beneath her fingers as the disc inside it starts spinning, converting compressed data into the physical vibrations of ambient chords.

Veera is done with speaking, so she turns her music up until she cannot hear anything else. She closes her eyes and does not look at Rachel, even though she can feel her sitting a few meters away like a dormant landmine.

Hours pass, and they do not acknowledge each other. Once it's dark enough for the stars to begin appearing, the only teller of time is Veera's watch and the exponentially increasing discomfort of the worn pleather bus seats. Veera shifts her legs into every imaginable position, but her muscles start zinging with restlessness every ten minutes.

After what is supposedly three hours, they decelerate into a rest stop. Veera has her Walkman and headphones packed away almost before they leave the exit lane, determined to make the most of the brief respite. She breathes slightly easier as the constant onslaught of the bus's rumbling dwindles to a more bearable grumble. She's the first one out the folding door, rejoicing at her body's brief freedom from that inescapable resonating roar.

She's savoring the stillness of the ground beneath her feet when a brightness in the dark sky flares in the corner of her vision. Phosphorescent curls of delicate blue-green light are flaring behind the silhouette of the small building housing the rest stop's bathrooms.

Veera gasps softly. It's been so long since she's seen them.

She darts forward to get a better view. She spares only a momentary glance over her shoulder back toward the bus, where Rachel is stepping straight-backed down from its height like it's a marble staircase. Veera's rubber soles slap against the smooth cement of the sidewalk as she pounds around the perimeter of the building. She stops in sudden silence when she comes into full view of those lights.

She abruptly slides her backpack off her shoulder and sits down cross-legged on the ground, basking in that soft green moonlike light. She slides off her hood to let the light wash over her entire face and head. Her mouth inches its way toward a smile for what feels like the first time in an eternity.

She feels the vibration of Rachel's approaching footsteps through the sidewalk as much as she hears them. The nascent smile falls away from Veera's facial muscles. Somehow, the sound of her walk is still reminiscent of heels, even when the soles of her sandals are as flat as the horizon at sea. They stop a little behind her to the right.

Veera doesn't speak. She doesn't know what to say, and she doesn't particularly want to share this moment with Rachel, of all people.

A stretch of silence is filled with only the minute whirrs and clicks of insects. The denim of Veera's borrowed jeans rustles a little as Rachel shifts her weight, but she does not sit down. Somehow, Veera can't imagine her ever sitting cross-legged on the ground.

"I've never seen the northern lights," Rachel says in a quiet, uninflected voice.

Veera blinks. "Never?" she asks. She cranes her neck to look up at Rachel. Her uplifted face is cast in a gentler green this time, but it's still as unrevealing as her voice. Veera looks back toward the lights.

"We call them _revontulet_ ," she says when Rachel doesn't answer. "Fox fires."

Rachel gives a small laugh, and this time it sounds less like a death rattle and more like something akin to actual amusement.

"Fire. Of course," Rachel says bitterly. She takes another step forward and stares with set jaw at the softly twisting lights, like she could hold them responsible for the source of that bitterness. Veera is uncomfortably aware of how the shining green must be highlighting her scars in horrible contrast from where Rachel's standing. Their murky, entangled past seems strangely close right now. Rachel possesses so many answers; if only Veera knew the right questions to ask.

The two of them stare at the sky with their not-quite-identical faces for a suspended moment. Then Rachel turns and walks back toward the bus without another word.

Veera continues watching the lights. They remind her of precious quiet nights back home, before her entire life burned to the ground for a second time. God, she doesn't know if she can survive a third fire. But she's filled her bag with knowledge like tinder, and Rachel is an unpredictable box of matches.


End file.
